I am pleased to report that my colleague Amr El Shalakany appears to be fine.
According to the AUC Newspaper, The Caravan, Amr El Shalakany, an associate professor of law at AUC, was arrested on April 27, 2011, in Sharm El Sheikh, "on what he says are trumped up charges." You can read the article here.
According to the article, Shalakany claims that police had planted an informant to support their charge that Shalakany attempted to burn a police station. AES was apparently detained for four days.
According to the article, "on the fourth day of detention, an investigation by the Military Prosecution Office found false eyewitness and unsubstantiated statements were used as the basis for the charges against Shalakany."
According to the article, Professor Shalakany is striking back against his mistreatment
"In a series of law suits currently launched by several Human Rights Organizations, led by the Hisham Mubarak Center, Shalakany is now formally accusing “the Chief of Sharm El Sheikh Police Station, the Chief of Investigations Bureau, the Director of Investigations Bureau, and at least four other police officers and detectives of the Investigations Bureau of conspiracy to frame him for a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison before a military tribunal."
He is lucky he was released. Apparently, Human Rights Watch reports that at least 5000 civilians have been tried in military tribunals in Egypt since the revolution. If his allegations of trumped up charges and false imprisonment are true, they represent a real human rights problem in Egypt. I thought from the beginning that the charges against him were nothing short of fantastic, as in "the product of fantasy."
For my previous coverage of this story, read here for a twitter update and here for my initial thoughts on the story.
WMB
One of the main problems with police corruption is that defendants do poorly even when they're innocent. Professor Shalakany was just lucky that he got an honest military prosecutor, and that when he was remanded back to the civilian police, that he managed to prove his innocence. It could have gone the other way since his actual innocence didn't seem to matter to the civilian police.
ReplyDeleteI hope Professor Shalakany prevails in his civil law suit, but, even more, I hope that in his role as a teacher of new lawyers in Egypt, he can influence the Egyptian legal establishment to work hard to root out corruption in government and police. Corruption is the enemy of freedom in any nation.